100 years of “Big Two-Hearted River”

Memorial Day is a fitting time recall Hemingway’s classic.

John N. Maclean’s foreword to the centennial edition of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” gives us the opportunity to explore the connection between the tragedy of war, the solace of fly-fishing and the various mysteries surrounding the story. Maclean has added another tributary to the river of splendid fly-fishing stories, connecting the Fox, the Big Two-Hearted and the Blackfoot together and taking us on a literary road trip exploring the genesis and mystery of Hemingway’s story.

“After my dad gave me the story to read in the 1950s, we sat down together to analyze it. We were both deeply pleased that fishing and literature could be successfully combined, and in future decades we would strive to do the same thing as writers. But we stumbled over the meanings of the dark metaphors that begin and end the story. “Big Two-Hearted River” is not simply a luminous fishing tale; it’s also an unsolved mystery.”

Maclean’s father, Norman, wrote “A River Runs Through It” and like “Big Two-Hearted River,” it is not just a fishing tale either. Maclean gives us a look at the unique lineage between these stories in his book “Home Waters.”

“My career took me away from the Midwest, and I did not read Hemingway again for many decades. I returned to him when I wrote Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, which describes his influence on my father and me, only to find that we had missed the big shift in interpretation of ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’” 

Maclean’s foreword is a fascinating look at how “Big Two-Hearted River” came to be more than a fly-fishing story and how Maclean’s extensive search ultimately united him with the story.

“But direct contact with its physical realities had greater impact, from viewing the handwritten drafts to standing in a meadow of green ferns punctuated by gray, century-old stumps to spending a week in the writer’s apartment at the Hemingway House. All these elements and more came together one crisp fall day that Hemingway would have loved, when the trail led me to the island wilderness below the house. There, with a fly rod in hand and a fish on the line, I felt closer than ever before to the midwestern boy who took his troubles to the river and came away with his spirit restored and old feeling regained.”

You can read more of the foreword in Solving the Mystery of Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ in Mountain Journal. But do yourself a favor and get a hard copy of the centennial edition so you can enjoy “Big Two-Hearted River” with Chris Wormell’s exceptional illustrations at the same time.

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Organizations like Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing and Rivers of Recovery are providing wounded veterans the opportunity to find the solace in fly-fishing that Hemingway wrote about so powerfully. I commend them to your attention and support.